Roar Stovner
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roarstovner.bsky.social
Roar Stovner
@roarstovner.bsky.social
300 followers 550 following 110 posts
Avid mathematics teacher that researches teaching. Currently studying how citations may distort or lend unwarranted authority to scientific claims.

I work at Oslo Metropolitan University in the Department of Teacher Education
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Roar Stovner
mkarhulahti.bsky.social
I'm curious if someone who studies this can explain the mechanism for "processing -> negative health"?

-- never understood this over the last 20 years & wikipedia says processing is just a synonym for junk food in this context
November 27, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
talyarkoni.com
a crucial thing i think is lost in much of the "is AI a net good or bad" narrative is the secondary impact to the vast majority of people who aren't at immediate risk of either losing their job or seeing it dramatically transformed. historically, this is where the bulk of utility comes from!
November 26, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
editoratlarge.bsky.social
From @aip-publishing.bsky.social: cost of a peer reviewed article is $2700 (*before* you start giving back to the community). Would like to see a more detailed split, but it does align with estimates from eLife and EMBO #ScientificPublishing

www.stm-publishing.com/cost-transpa...
Cost Transparency at AIP Publishing: Why We’re Sharing Our True Costs
AIP Publishing is committed to building a more inclusive and vibrant future for the physical sciences. Open science can accelerate global progress by breaking barriers to open and fair research commun...
www.stm-publishing.com
November 23, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
neural-reckoning.org
How do we make sense of scientific literature that is growing explosively to the point where no-one could read all the relevant papers, and is contaminated with fraudulent and LLM-generated papers? I think that science isn't currently equipped to deal with this, and we need to. #science #metascience
November 20, 2025 at 5:01 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
pipinghotdata.com
The recording of my #rstats posit::conf talk ✨ practical {renv}✨ is available! 🎉

I created this talk for frustrated {renv} users 🫠 and potential {renv} users🤩

youtu.be/l01u7Ue9pIQ?...

Even if {renv} isn't on your radar, you may still find this talk interesting if you are curious about🤔...
Practical {renv} (Shannon Pileggi, The PCCTC) | posit::conf(2025)
YouTube video by Posit PBC
youtu.be
November 11, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
samuelmoore.org
Newly released Stockholm Declaration recommends the following reforms to publishing:

1. Academia resumes control of publishing

2. Incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity

3. Independent fraud detection and prevention

4. Legislation and policies to protect science quality and integrity
Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration | Royal Society Open Science
Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication....
royalsocietypublishing.org
November 5, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
tedunderwood.com
Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +
Opinion | AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It.
If we want to stay at the forefront of knowledge production, we must fit technology to our needs.
www.chronicle.com
November 4, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
lswisnom.bsky.social
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
November 3, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
tespiteri.bsky.social
Uljana Feest’s 'Operationism in Psychology: An Epistemology of Exploration' provides a rigorous and insightful analysis of psychological research. This important contribution is a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophy and history of science. I’ve jotted dow some brief reflections below
Operationism recast as method: Feest’s epistemology of exploration - Metascience
Metascience -
link.springer.com
October 15, 2025 at 11:23 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
yabellini.bsky.social
📣 This is today (50 minutes from now)!
Join us. 🙂 📦 #RStats

rOpenSci Community Call, R-multiverse: a new way to publish R packages

📆 Monday, 29 September 2025 14:00 UTC
with Will Landau

Information + How to join: ropensci.org/commcalls/r-...
R-multiverse: a new way to publish R packages · Community Call
Community Call about R-multiverse
ropensci.org
September 29, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...
Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.
www.nytimes.com
September 26, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
alexh.bsky.social
The most influential authorship guidelines are those of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, and they require all co-authors to contribute to the writing of a paper reporting a project. Just doing all the non-writing work for the project is not sufficient for co-authorship! 🤔
September 23, 2025 at 9:46 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
djnavarro.net
Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again
Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch
For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic
blog.djnavarro.net
September 21, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
thomasp85.com
I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats
ggplot2 4.0.0
A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.
www.tidyverse.org
September 11, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
shuhbillskee.bsky.social
On reflection, this is a really magical time to be on Bluesky. A quiet period before some important dynamics start to happen. I think things will start to change here because of things happening outside Bluesky and the things happening under Bluesky.
September 4, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
upshot.nytimes.com
How Elon Musk Is Remaking Grok in His Image

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/t...
September 2, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
pengzell.bsky.social
flying blind into peer review
my brain replays
every line i left vague
each one now
a liability
September 2, 2025 at 7:46 AM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
sanjaysrivastava.com
Rossiter coined the term "Matilda effect" for when women's scientific work is attributed to men.

It was a twist on the "Matthew effect," famously attributed to Robert Merton, but actually studied jointly by Merton and his wife Harriet Zuckerman, who was denied co-authorship
monicamedhist.bsky.social Monica H Green @monicamedhist.bsky.social · Aug 30
Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️
August 30, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
rosendahlke.bsky.social
Bra innlegg av Erling Moxnes, bl.a. om 'fastleddet' i nettleia:
"Det er uforutsigbart og svært vanskelig å forstå og forholde seg til."
Og det "styrer ikke det totale forbruket vekk fra perioder med stort press i strømnettet"
Enig 👍 Behov for endring av nettleia!
www.energiogklima.no/meninger-og-...
Lønnsomhet for private solceller med Norgespris
Endringer i nettleien kan gjøre solceller på hustak lønnsomt – selv med Norgespris på strøm, skriver professor Erling Moxnes.
www.energiogklima.no
August 24, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
matloff.bsky.social
#rstats #statistics

I've released my new open source book, "Powered by Linear Algebra: the role of matrices and vector space in data science," at matloff.github.io/WackyLinearA....

Turns the classic LA course on its head! Still proves the theorems, but with a deep emphasis on applications.
matloff.github.io
August 15, 2025 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
hansonmark.bsky.social
If I could change one thing about #ScientificPublishing I'd ask funding bodies to stipulate all work they fund be published in non-profit journals.

The knock-on effects would alleviate most of the strain on #AcademicSky.

This isn't hard. It's big, but actually, it's pretty easy.

1/n
The strain on scientific publishing
Abstract. Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. The total number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science has grown exponentially in recent years; ...
direct.mit.edu
August 4, 2025 at 8:10 AM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
kevinzollman.com
Different disciplines handle the division of labor between theory and experiment. Some fields have dedicated theoreticians who hardly ever do experiments (and vice versa). Others divide it less strongly or not at all.

Why is this?
August 3, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
djangowexler.bsky.social
Periodically I like to do little tests with ChatGPT (the free version) using stuff that might be too obscure to be in the database, because it's interesting and it wastes Sam Altman's money.

Today I was doing logic problems from 15-251. The AI had clearly heard this one before.
August 3, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Reposted by Roar Stovner
hadley.nz
🐘 ellmer 🐘 makes it easy and fun to use LLMs from #rstats, and 0.3.0 is out now. Read about the new streamlined chat() function, improvements to tool specifications, and more at www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/07....
ellmer 0.3.0
The newest version of ellmer introduces a simpler `chat()` interface that can works with any provider, a bunch of improvements to tool calling, and a handful of smaller quality of life improvements.
www.tidyverse.org
July 25, 2025 at 1:25 PM